


Weeds

by Aiffe



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Mother-Son Relationship, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-15
Updated: 2016-02-15
Packaged: 2018-05-20 16:10:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6015943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aiffe/pseuds/Aiffe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Someone has to stay here and tend the flowers.” Toriel tries to look after Flowey in the Ruins.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Weeds

Mother tends the garden in the Ruins. She pulls up handfuls of the pale, thin weeds that grow in a place without light. She makes a face as she clears the mushrooms that come to feed on the devastation. She cooks them to ashes in her oven—carefully, in small batches—and spreads the rich, fertile ash in her son’s soil.

“You’re really killing everything, huh? Sorta reminds me of someone.”

Toriel holds her head high. “They would have competed with you…choked you out. You’re so much more fragile than they are. And they’re only weeds.”

Is she really worried about him being fragile? Hah.

“Dad’s a much better gardener.”

Toriel stiffens. “That buffoon would snip you in half by mistake before he’d realized what he’d done.”

Asriel does sort of miss the other flowers though. And his dad, maybe. As much as a flower can miss anything. The Ruins are getting so empty. All the lovely climbing vines have been torn down, leaving pillars like ancient bones. Looking at all that black, dead space makes him feel….

Empty.

Mother buries Chara’s body in Asriel’s soil. She leaves the coffin behind, and puts the child bare in the dirt. She smooths it over, and yellow flowers bloom. She will care for her children, of course. She won’t leave them behind to lie wakefully in Asgore’s hall of coffins. But, Asriel suspects, it’s more than that. This child, who was the death of him, will now feed him. Their bones will provide Asriel’s new form with calcium and phosphorous. It is Toriel’s own kind of quiet justice. Gardener’s justice. It wins in the grave if nowhere else.

So Chara’s flesh seeps into Asriel’s stem, into his leaves, into the brilliance of his yellow petals. And yet so full of Chara’s essence, he still feels so….

Empty.

He kills his mother. Just to see how it feels, to see the shock in her eyes cede to acceptance, then blankness. He leaves this dark place, wanders a while. Wanders.

Empty, empty.

He resets.

Mother’s life is back, like a puppet on a string. She says many of the things she said before. She pulls the weeds, burns them to ashes, spreads the white ash. But sometimes she looks at him, just for a moment, as though she knows something, or remembers something.

The ruins are becoming more desolate. Himself, and his avatars—the other flowers that are part of him—are the only things that grow. They carpet the grave.

He kills her again, because when she holds him too tightly he goes numb, but when he’s bloodsoaked and terrible sometimes he feels a shadow of something real—whatever that feeling is that makes him reset. A hollowness that’s more hollow than all the others. That makes it almost a relief to be good.

Sometimes other children fall. They’re cushioned by his body, his body fed by the bones of their predecessor. Mother takes them in, protects them, calls them “my child.” Somehow, that hits him the hardest. He was her child. Chara was her child. If they’re gone, she doesn’t get to move on. She doesn’t get to coddle a real person while he’s still a flower. He hates them. He hates them. It fills the void, echoes against the brittle bones of the Ruins. So he leads them astray.

He’s never killed one, though. He lets Father do that. He isn’t sure why. Even just to try it and reset? Somehow he just can’t. They’re too much like….

They’re too much.

They come and go, but Mother still cares for him always. She fusses too much, really. She waters him with her tears, and he wants to tell her that it burns him, but the words never come.

He tries to see if he kills her enough times, if she’ll stop coming here.

She doesn’t.

She seems the same, really.

Sometimes she talks to him about the child he used to be. Shows him pictures. He remembers it, distantly, as if it happened to someone else. Was he really that pathetic? Did he really need protecting that much? Disgusting. If he wasn’t already dead, he’d kill himself.

He knows, as the creature he is, or was, that his parents’ SOULs should be flowing into him. But Toriel hasn’t aged. His sense of time might be off, but he knows it isn’t _that_ off. She’s still here because he isn’t real. Or isn’t really Asriel. And she must know that too.

She works her paws into the rich black soil where nothing else is allowed to grow, humming softly. “Don’t worry, my child. I will always be here to tend these flowers for you.”

That’s sort of what he’s afraid of.

**Author's Note:**

> I know it wasn't clear whether Toriel knew what became of her son, but the line about someone needing to tend the flowers that she says after you spare her got me thinking about this.
> 
> Anyway, [it's on tumblr too](http://forbitten-fruit.tumblr.com/post/139328052057/fic-weeds-undertale-gen).


End file.
